


this love will keep us through blinding of the eyes

by floodonthefloor



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Dani Clayton - Freeform, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, F/F, HERE WE ARE AGAIN, amelia eve did such a good job acting out this character, damie - Freeform, her approach to dani and the kids, her childhood her motives why she is the way she is, her relationship with her nemesis peter quint, i am so enraptured by jamie as a character and wanted to flesh her out way more, what happens after the damie scenes that cut to another scene, what she does when shes not at the manor, who is 100 feet taller than her but she still would square up and throw hands anyway, without as much of a backstory flesh out as some of the other characters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:21:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27359446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/floodonthefloor/pseuds/floodonthefloor
Summary: “Look, could we go just go back to the bit where, uh, you were acting mental and I had to talk you down?”And Dani laughs that laugh again.Magnetic. Beautiful.Jamie doesn’t know it, not acutely at least, but making Dani laugh brings her an immediate rush in a way that watching her flowers grow doesn’t.Jamie doesn’t know it, not acutely at least, but Dani has planted something between them that Jamie isn’t quite sure she wants to weed out.ORCanon Bly Manor from Jamie's POV with extra Damie scenes and a canon-divergent happy ending because god fucking dammit we deserve it
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 87
Kudos: 260





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

> i am so so so affected by this piece of media more than i have been in my entire life. i'm so so intrigued by jamie and her story, and her relationship with dani - i know that the show as a whole was about love in all different forms, obsessive, religious love, familial, platonic, but i wanted to make one focusing entirely on damie. so this fic is going to be completely canon compliant right up until it's not - imagine bly manor if it was 100% about damie and focused on their relationship throughout the series. also, i'm going to give them a happy ending because fuck we deserve a happy ending.
> 
> i'm going to do a few chapters at a time and keep them short and digestible, more one shots than anything but still all connected. here's the first 3.
> 
> hope u enjoy please leave kudos and comments where you want because i do not have much of a social media presence and this is my primary way of enjoying fandom. love you hope youre all well

Jamie does notice the new au pair, the one Hannah says is named Dani Clayton, the moment she walks into the kitchen, but she doesn’t do much more than that. Notice, that is. Her hands are vaguely aching from pulling weeds and shearing hedges all day. It’s getting colder, which means she’s got to start focusing on the plants in her greenhouse for the next spring, mapping out in her head where and what she wants to plant.

She’s thinking hydrangeas. Cosmos. Marigolds, maybe. Something colourful.

She really doesn’t mean to ignore Dani, but she recognizes that look. Beautiful, bright-eyed, nervous energy, eager to make a good first impression.

Too much like Rebecca, if she’s being honest.

So, Jamie doesn’t say hi. She doesn’t introduce herself. She’s sure Hannah and Owen have already told Dani that her name is Jamie the Gardener, anyway. No need for the pleasantries. That’s more than enough information.

And it’s really not because Jamie and Rebecca were good friends, because they weren’t. It’s not that Jamie doesn’t want to bother with the replacement au pair. It’s not even really about Rebecca or Dani, at all. It’s that she found Flora staring at Rebecca’s dead body in the lake, only days after Jamie had swallowed her pride and the “I told you so” lecture to tell Rebecca to take life by the fucking horns and demand a pupilage from Lord Wingrave. They weren’t good friends. But Jamie made the effort. Saw something in the au pair that Rebecca couldn’t see in herself. And it was all for nothing.

So, Jamie washes off the dirt caked on her hands and makes a quip about the kids being gremlins. Flora and Miles haven’t been quite right for a while, Miles especially, but Jamie can’t bring herself to look too far into it. She was hired to take care of the grounds, the plants, not the children. And yeah, the children are acting strange, almost to the point where ignoring it won’t suffice, but only _almost,_ which means Jamie can still get away with acting as though everything is normal and fine.

Jamie won’t ignore the new au pair, but she won’t make an effort to start conversation with her, either. She flicks water on the two kids that she’s watched grow up far more than they’ve had to in their young age and seats herself to dig into Owen’s bangers and mash.

_Marigolds, for sure. My moonflowers should be blooming, soon. Sweet peas?_

There’s a conversation about a man on the parapet, and Jamie wonders if some of the little fuckers from the village decided to sneak in, steal some things, enjoy the novelty of being in an ostentatious manor full of stories about dead parents and rich kids.

Hannah mentions that Dani might have just been seeing things.

Jamie’s not so sure.

But she won’t get involved.

She eats the rest of her meal in silence, planning out the remainder of her day ( _she’s got to check in on her roses, they might be ready to cut in a week or two_ ), watching Flora try to stick mashed potatoes in Miles’ ear ( _fucking kids_ ). When Jamie stands to put away her plate and leave, Dani offers to take it from her. There’s a polite exchange of:

_“Thanks.”_

_“No problem.”_

A meek smile.

It’s not much of a start.

But it’s a start nonetheless.


	2. rest, relaxation

_Jamie is 13 and has just gotten home from school, her right hand smarting from, once again, hitting a kid in the face. Today, it was a boy who’d taped a piece of paper on her back that had WHORE’S DAUGHTER written on it. Jack Davies had patted it onto her back in a faux gesture of congratulations after a game of dodgeball. A surprising gesture. Jamie couldn’t remember the last time she’d been praised for anything, so she’d taken it with a grin._

_She didn’t notice for two hours. Two whole fucking hours._

_So, after school, she approaches him on the walk home. She says, “Oi! Davies!”, and her fist soundly makes contact with his cheek as soon as he turns. He stumbles, and then he swings back, of course. He’s not going to let a tiny, curly-haired_ daughter of a whore _hit him without consequence, but he just barely misses her chin and falls forward. His friends roar with laughter around him and Jamie feels triumphant for about three seconds before the kid’s back on his feet, screaming at her about how she’s going to end up selling her minge for cash once she’s inevitably on the streets._

_“Walk away, dear little poppet,” his friends jeer at her. Davies’ friends might laugh at him for falling, but they’ll help him up again, laugh about the queer little girl who’d landed him flat on his ass. Jamie is angry, and impulsive in anger, but she knows she can’t take on three schoolboys. Yet. So she walks away._

_She was 10 when it all first started, not even quite sure what the word “whore” meant. Only that it was a horrible word that had to do with her mum. Something to do with Mikey not really being her brother._

_So Jamie gets home, needing ice for her knuckles, and Mikey’s sitting by the stairs, wailing. Something about mummy packing a bag. Something about mummy saying she’s not comin’ back._

_Whore’s daughter, she thinks to herself. Alone again._

_-_

Jamie smokes her cigarette, leaning back against the creaky lawn chair, watching the au pair gently guiding Flora’s hands around the weeds. Hannah’s got the day off, it seems. Owen’s gone off to the kitchen to make them some G&Ts. Hannah says something about Miles and Flora locking the au pair in their closet.

Fucking kids. Fucking strange kids. Jamie often wonders if they’re damaged beyond repair.

_Not my problem._

“How’re they doing?” Dani says, looking directly at Jamie, jerking her chin towards the children. Flora is shaking dirt from some roots. Miles looks forlorn as always, as though he’s a teenager feeling like he’s too old to be playing with toy cars.

“Perfectly,” Jamie says, giving the au pair the OK sign with her hand, unable to suppress the grin that bubbles up at Dani’s easy enthusiasm. It’s magnetic. Something Jamie hasn’t seen in a while. Not since she’d first met Hannah and Owen, really. Bly isn’t much of a breeding ground for interesting, enchanting characters, so when the occasional outsider breaks into the gravity well of Bly, any and all differences are noticeable. Like how Dani makes a point to crouch down to eye level with the children to speak to them, treating them as equals. Her nervous laugh, nervous walk. How she keeps inexplicably looking towards Jamie, the question of _is this alright?_ in her eyes as she directs Miles through the weeds, as though she needs explicit permission to disrupt Jamie’s plants and her gardens.

Owen settles down beside them for a few moments and Jamie can’t help but poke at him, poke the sleeping bear, make note of how pretty the new au pair is. She doesn’t ever recall hearing about any flings he’s had, any girlfriends, handsome as he is, and can’t help but think of how well Owen and Dani would mesh. There’s a small twinge of something in her stomach, something that feels a little like jealousy, the feeling that she’s missing out on something like _meshing with another person,_ but she doesn’t chalk it up to _meshing with Dani._

“It’s just that romances don’t fare well at Bly, do they?” Hannah murmurs, and Owen’s excusing himself, Jamie half-annoyed at the bringing-up of such a dark period of their collective lives, half-appreciative of the reminder.

Hannah tells Jamie about a crack in the kitchen wall and Jamie’s vexed at the thought. If there’s any kind of leak, any further damage, that’s her entire day out the god damned window. This fucking house. She nods, says she’ll take a look.

For now, she watches the au pair laugh at Flora talking about how it’s unfair that weeds are treated like the enemy, when all they want to do is grow.

“Who are we to say where weeds can’t grow?” Flora says, furrowing her tiny eyebrows, cradling a handful of weeds in her hands.

“They disrupt the beautiful plants Jamie raises,” Dani responds gently. Flora shrugs, nods, and then throws the handful of weeds into the bin.

“I suppose you’re right.” Flora looks up at Jamie. “Your flowers are perfectly splendid, Jamie,” she says.

 _Perfectly splendid._ Jamie remembers one year back, wishing Rebecca had never taught the girl the phrase after the fifth repeat within two sentences, but now she smiles at the sound. A small piece of Rebecca, one that has nothing to do with Peter Fucking Quint.

Perfectly splendid, it is.

“Thanks, poppet,” Jamie says, winking. Dani beams at her.

Jamie thinks she might like this new au pair.

Just _likes_ , though. Dani’s a presence that isn’t all too bad. A light one, really, albeit nervous and vaguely chaotic.

Jamie doesn’t _not_ like Dani.

Which is more than Jamie can say for anyone new she’s met in the past few years.


	3. poppins' panic

_Mikey sits by the telly while Jamie starts on a pot of water, about to make buttered spaghetti noodles for the fifth time this week for her brother to eat. Denny’s off somewhere as usual, kicking around the neighbourhood with the local rats, probably mouthing off about the whores in his family and how he’ll never fuck about with any women who open their legs for anyone like his mum did. Twat._

_Their dad was supposed to come home yesterday but decided to stay a little longer underground, said there’s more work to be done and not enough men to do it, but Jamie knows now that this is a lie._

_She’s tired. She misses school most days, trying to make sure Mikey’s ready for his own classes, making sure the house stays upright, learning how to fix pipes and cracks in the drywall herself. Administrators send letters home warning her parents about the missed classes. Jamie doesn’t even bother throwing them out, hiding them, not anymore. The headmaster has threatened expulsion if she keeps it up, but she just sneers at him._

_Expulsion for Jamie missing classes, but no expulsions, no suspensions for the boys and girls who occasionally corner her during lunch hours when they’re bored, making the same jokes about her mum and her cuckold dad._

_Jamie doesn’t even bother fighting them anymore. She just keeps her head down, grits her teeth, replays the image of Davies’ face when she hit him as a reprieve._

_So, Jamie is tired. She’s a kid, for Christ’s sake. She doesn’t know how to cook for shite. She hasn’t got any friends. She doesn’t quite know what to do with Mikey comes down with a cold one day, only that he needs tea and rest and a mother’s love._

_Jamie is tired. So she sits under the stove, leaning back against it, waiting for the water to boil._

_She wakes to searing pain on her right shoulder. The pot’s boiling over. Fuck, fuck, fuck. It pours onto her shoulder, her arm, her hands. Her shoulder gets the worst of it. She runs to the neighbours, crying, trying not to scream, she can’t scare Mikey._

_“Where’s your father? Where’s Dennis?” they would ask. She’d say he’s working, back soon. But they all know he’s in the mines. It’s a small town. There are no secrets. They know he hasn’t been home in a long while._

_So, they call social services after they drop Jamie off at the hospital. A woman in a grey pantsuitthat’s too big for her shows up in her room, Mikey holding her hand, Denny sulking behind them._

_They’re sending you to a better place, the woman says._

_Jamie believes her._

-

Jamie gathers up spackle, some paint, other tools to start on the supposed crack in the kitchen wall.

_Definitely will plant marigolds. Maybe daisies, if I’m feeling cheeky._

She’s almost at the entrance when she sees Dani do her little anxious run outside, clearly hyperventilating. Something’s not right. Jamie would bet her left foot that the kids have done something shitty to her yet again. Another locked closet, maybe?

If she cared enough (which she doesn’t, she swears), Jamie would go drag them by the ears herself and make them apologize to the clearly distraught au pair. Little fuckers. How Henry Wingrave hasn’t sent the two off to psychologists yet, Jamie doesn’t know.

“You alright?” Jamie says, and the speed in which Dani stops breathing is actually quite astonishing.

“Yeah,” she says shakily, not looking back at her, and Jamie holds the urge to roll her eyes as she places her buckets down.

“Kids. Run you ragged,” she says, tucking her hands in her back pockets, rocking back and forth on her heels.

Jamie’s already speaking more than she’d like, but she can’t find the will to freeze Dani out after all Dani had done with the kids in the gardens. An arsehole move to do so, even by her own standards. So, she does what she knows how to do best, joke about an otherwise serious situation, try to get a laugh out to bandage the wound. “If it’s child-rearing advice you’re after —“ And it works.

Dani’s laugh comes out and it seems to shock her. Jamie looks on, a grin appearing on her own face. She thinks of the word _magnetic_ again. _Contagious. Beautiful._

“There we are,” she says, looking at Dani’s smiling side profile, tear-streaked cheeks. “It’s not so bad, is it? I cry three, maybe four times a day around here.”

Not entirely a lie. Jamie won’t ever admit it to anyone, but she cries easily. Something she’d never allowed herself to do as a child. As an adult, she learned that she could cry whenever she wanted, at whatever she wanted. So, when she’s digging up aphid-infested roots and thinks of Mikey holding the social service worker’s hand in the hospital, the question of _was it me? Is it my fault?_ in his eyes again, she allows herself to cry in solitude, among her plants, who watch silently.

She makes Dani smile again with a remark about watering plants with her deep, inconsolable tears, and she can already feel herself itching to get another laugh out of her. So, she does what she knows how to do best. She stops herself.

“Back to it, then. Chin up, Poppins,” she says, picking up her buckets and walking off.

Dani’s laugh is playing in her head when she walks through the doors.

_Magnetic._

_-_

Jamie is staring up at the crack-less wall, squinting up as though maybe, just maybe, Hannah saw something of a hairline fracture that Jamie can’t see, for whatever reason. Because if there isn’t a crack, that means that it might be related to the way Hannah, lately, has been acting distant, spaced-out, disappearing at odd hours. And Jamie doesn’t want to think about that.

There’s the unmistakable sound of tiny-human footsteps to her left, and she sees Miles, sauntering with his hands in his pockets, past the kitchen door. He’s been doing that more and more, these days. Mirroring Quint. Jamie gets it, she really does, the whole needing a father figure thing, but she wishes Miles had taken a page out of Owen’s book instead of the tall, leering, chain-smoking fucker.

“Ah, where d’you think you’re off to?

He’s off to pick more weeds, apparently, which is strange considering that Jamie’s pretty sure Dani was unbelievably thorough in getting the kids to clear that particular patch. So she makes a joke he probably won’t understand about time off for good behaviour (she got out a year early for keeping her head down and in the prison garden).

“Have a lovely afternoon, Jamie darling,” Miles says, and Jamie feels a strange, cold grip on the back of her neck as he walks off. Dread. _What the fuck is wrong with this child?_

“Darling,” she mutters to herself, shaking her head, shaking the feeling off, staring up at the wall again.

-

Jamie tries to find Hannah to let her know the crack’s not there, but once again, she can’t find her anywhere. She checks the chapel, where Hannah is usually seated by the candles praying in her spare time, but there’s no sign of her.

She’s out the doors and headed to the greenhouse, buckets still in hand, when Dani approaches her from the left.

“Hey, Poppins,” Jamie greets casually, not stopping her stride, not sparing more than a glance, because stopping her stride means stopping for conversation. Dani seems to think the inverse. She follows Jamie’s pace and soon they’re walking side-by-side.

She smells nice. Like shampoo and florals —

_Shut up._

“Hi,” Dani says. “I — I’m not entirely sure what your rules are for the kids and your gardens —“

“They don’t beat about in my gardens, and I don’t beat them about,” Jamie says simply, “It’s an implicit agreement.”

“Right,” Dani says, chuckling nervously, and Jamie doesn’t have a good feeling about this, she has a feeling this isn’t about the kids helping out with the weeds. “Well, Miles wanted to apologize to me, for — you know —“

“Locking you in a closet?”

“Well, yeah.” Dani puts her hand on Jamie’s shoulder, a startling contact, and it stops them both in their tracks. Her hand is off as soon as it came on, but Jamie still feels it nonetheless. “Look, I wanted to tell you this. He gave me some — he gave me some roses. I think he might have —“

“That little —“ Jamie sets her jaw and is moving again, speedwalking to her rose bushes.

_If he did what I think he did, I swear to fuck, I swear to absolute fuck._

Petals. Everywhere. Some of the roses are intact, but many of the smaller ones lay pathetically on the grass, in the dirt, already starting to wilt.

Jamie crouches down, picking one up, careful not to prick herself on the thorns. The kid’s somehow had the foresight to strip the thorns from the bouquet presumably given to Dani, because there are little sharp points everywhere in the grass.

“Little shit,” she says, anger bubbling up, anger that she’s felt since he called her _darling,_ remembering when this exact situation happened with Peter Fucking Quint.

_“It’s just some flowers, isn’t it?” he’d said, towering over her, deliberately stepping closer while looking down at her, shit-eating grin on his face. "No need for the dramatics, Jamie, darling."_

_“Listen here, you shit,” Jamie said, “I don’t know what Hannah and Owen let you get away with, and Lord fucking knows what Henry told you you can get away with, but I guarantee you this.” She steps closer, stands up straighter, still a head shorter than him, but squaring up nonetheless, holding up her shears. “If you touch my fucking gardens again, I will take these and fucking castrate you. Do you hear me? My gardens are not for you to play around in and use for your Prince Charming act.”_

_“Jesus, Jamie,” he said, holding up his hands, chuckling, only serving to make Jamie even angrier, “You’re one hell of a charmer, you know that?”_

_“I’m not,” she said, stepping back, “And now you know I’m not. I might not be able to tell you to stay away from the manor, or Rebecca, or Hannah and Owen, but I sure as fuckin' hell can tell you to stay the fuck away from me. And my plants.”_

“Hey,” Dani says from behind her, stern, but Jamie doesn’t give a shit. She won’t deal with this again. She’s not going to let Quint’s influence ruin her gardens through a fucking child.

“Little fucking shit,” she says, standing.

“He’s just a kid,” Dani says again, and it takes everything in Jamie to stay calm.

“I’m gonna kill him. I swear to god —“

And suddenly Dani’s hand is on her shoulder again.

“No, hey, they’re just a few flowers —“

Jamie whirls around, calmness be damned.

 _Just a few flowers._ She doesn’t understand how much work it takes to grow roses, irrigating them, making sure pests don’t eat them alive, mulching, any of it.

“Oh! Sure,” she says, sarcasm dripping in her words, seeing red, all of the cliches, “Well, that’s fine, then.”

“A little boy cut a few flowers, what’s the big deal —”

“They weren’t ready to be cut!” Jamie roars in her face.

What Dani doesn’t know is that Jamie plants flowers and hedges and picks out weeds because she knows exactly what they need and she knows exactly how they’ll end up, and when they’ll die. If one of them starts to wilt, she can look at where it’s situated, check on its roots, and she’ll know how to fix it. If one of them dies, she can plant another that looks the same. Some plants die in the winter. Others thrive in the summer. She knows this.

Mikey starts coughing up a lung and Jamie doesn’t know what to do, no way in hell, all she knows is to pile on the tea, cough syrup, make him sleep, but the next day he gets worse. So Jamie waters the roses because the next morning a few new buds start to bloom.

And she is sick and fucking tired of privileged little boys cutting them as if they’ve never had to grow a flower in their entire lives.

But then suddenly Dani is looking at her with real hurt in her eyes, what looks like an apology swimming in them, as if it’s her fault personally that the little shit Miles has decided to cut up her roses, and Jamie feels herself softening instantly in a way that she hasn’t done in a long time.

 _Fuck._ Jamie lets out a deep sigh, centring herself the way Tamara taught her how to when she was inside, takes a step back.

“Look, I just — I have a way of doing things, and I don’t like people messing about in my gardens,” she explains calmly, feeling the need to console the au pair instead of yell in her face like she wants to, like she wants to with Miles, like she did with Peter Quint.

And then Dani does something unexpected. She agrees with Jamie.

“No, you’re right. You’re right. I’ll talk to him.”

And just like that, Jamie is back to her base state. “‘Course,” she says, shifting her weight back and forth on her feet, feeling bashful all of a sudden. So, she does what she does best. Makes a joke.

“Look, could we go just go back to the bit where, uh, you were acting mental and I had to talk you down?”

And Dani laughs again.

Magnetic. Beautiful.

Jamie doesn’t know it, not acutely at least, but making Dani laugh brings her an immediate rush in a way that watching her flowers grow doesn’t.

Jamie doesn’t know it, not acutely at least, but Dani has planted something between them that Jamie isn’t quite sure she wants to weed out.


	4. there’s something wrong with miles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is an extension of what i think would have happened after the angry rose scene, and what happened between then and jamie coming back after the peter quint sighting. 
> 
> hope you're all keeping yourselves sane and safe during this time. i'm not from america but i hope you're all faring alright, take care of yourselves, don't be afraid to take a pause from all the news. xo

_Dennis shuffles into Jamie’s hospital room, literal hat in hand. There’s grime caked into his fingernails, patches of his arms. A permanent fixture, a result of living so long underground that the mines claim your skin as its own. The social service worker named Sammy hovers behind him, Mikey and Denny sitting somewhere in the hospital lounge, waiting._

_“You alright, then?” Dennis says, taking a few hesitant steps towards Jamie’s bed, as though he’s waiting for permission from her to come closer. She doesn’t give it to him. In fact, she doesn’t look at him at all. She just nods._

_Her burns didn’t require any surgery, thank fuck, but she still can’t quite put any weight lying down on her right shoulder, blisters rampant across her hands and arms. It’s her fault that she’s here, and she knows it. It’s her fault that Sammy, in her ugly, oversized, monochromatic pantsuits, hovers like a ghost behind her father. Dennis being here only exacerbates this thought in her mind._

_“Look, uh,” Dennis says, scratching the back of his head, then putting his bowler hat back on, “I’ve been— we —“ - he looks back at Sammy - “We’ve been talking — me and Miss Jackson here, I mean — and I’m trying to find a way for us to all stay together, but it doesn’t seem like — it doesn’t seem like she thinks that’s possible. At least, not unless your mum comes back. And we haven’t been able to get a hold of her.”_

_Jamie sets her jaw, stares forward. He’s telling her everything she already fucking knows._

_“So, love, we think it’s best if — if some other people take care of you for a little while. I’ll still be around, ‘course, but they’ll take care of you lot better than I can while I work some more. It’s busy down there. Lots of men having to — take leave.”_

_In this moment, she hates him more than she’s ever hated him or Louise combined. Hates how he calls her “love”. She hates how he uses “we”, hates how he lies so blatantly, she hates how he doesn’t shoulder any of the blame._ No fucking pun intended _, she thinks to herself bitterly._

_Sammy cuts in. “We’ve found a lovely family for you to stay with for a while. Unfortunately, they've only enough space for one, but they’re so excited to meet you.”_

_“You're separating us? Into foster care?” Jamie says, bitterness coating the inside of her mouth. She still refuses to look at Dennis. “Say it outright, then. Foster care. You’re leaving me out in the dirt.”_

_“I’m doing no such thing —“_

_Jamie’s doctor’s voice sounds from behind them._

_“I’m sorry to interrupt. Jamie, I’ve got some painkillers here for you.”_

_Jamie feels the lump in her throat, thick and hot like lava, but she swallows it down. She won’t cry. She won’t give that to Dennis._

_“I’m tired, now,” she mutters, reaching her hand out for the paper cup of pills that the doctor gives her. “I’d like to go to sleep.”_

_There's a few seconds of pause, the doctor quite awkwardly standing by as she takes the medicine, and Dennis is out the door without another word._

_-_

Jamie walks Dani back to the manor, still feeling somewhat apologetic for her outburst about the roses just moments earlier. Only somewhat, though. Jamie hasn’t been one for apologies. Not really.

“I just don’t understand,” Dani says, her shoulder brushing against Jamie’s as they walk, and Jamie angles her steps so that they’re further apart. “Miles is — he’s lovely until he isn’t. It’s like he just — decides to act weird and off until he gets bored of it. Flora, too, in her own way.”

 _Welcome to the party,_ Jamie thinks to herself. Miles had never, _never_ been outright malicious before Charlotte and Dominic died. Even after they died, the most he’d done was the occasional emotional outburst, normal for a kid who’s just lost his mum and dad.

She wonders if Rebecca’s death was the last straw, but if that was the case, how come Flora remained as pleasant as she was (albeit incredibly strange, talking to the walls, looking over your shoulder when you speak to her as though she’s speaking to someone else)? Miles hadn't seemed as attached to Rebecca as Flora had been. 

Peter Quint went missing and it was as though Miles had decided his absence needed to be filled. But why Peter? _Fucking Peter Quint._

She shakes her head, stopping herself from thinking through it any further. It's not her problem. Goddammit.

“Look, I’m not going to pretend I’m some child-rearin’ expert, you know I'm not. I don’t know what the answer to any of this is,” Jamie says, opening the front door for Dani to enter first. Dani gives her a polite _thank you,_ looking down with that demure, bashful look that Jamie’s already beginning to become endeared to. “But what I will say is that you’re the first I’ve ever seen making the kids do actual hard work for the weird shite they pull rather than a verbal slap on the wrist. Maybe the key is some better discipline. Whippin’ ‘em up into shape.”

Dani lets out a short giggle, and Jamie’s grinning again at the sound. _Stop it._ She looks down to compose herself, then stuffs her hands into her pockets.

“I was telling Hannah about how Rebecca coddled ‘em,” Jamie continues, stopping in the lobby.

She never quite understood what it is, but every time she enters, she could swear she sees little movements here and there. Like the house opens up a little every time someone walks in.

“Rebecca coddled them, and so did Charlotte and Dominic. So did Henry, really, before…” she trails off, shrugging. “And yeah, it’s right fucked for kids to have lost their parents so young, but there comes a time where it doesn’t matter how much shit you go through. You still have to be a decent person. Better to start ‘em off young, teachin’ them that.”

Dani looks at Jamie with a strange, observant, curious look that Jamie doesn’t think she likes. She doesn’t like being watched. Perceived. Interpreted. Especially not by pretty au pairs who, just a moment ago, Jamie was about to throttle for defending a 10 year old boy.

“You’re right,” Dani concedes, again, and Jamie is almost in awe of how agreeable she’s being. “You’re right, you do have to be a decent person.”

“Right.” Jamie clears her throat. “Well, I’m off, then. Let little Wingrave know that if he touches my plants again —“

“He won’t,” Dani says, crossing her arms and smiling, looking down at her feet before looking back up at Jamie. “I’ll see to that. Promise.”

“Alright. Trusting you here, Poppins.”

And with a nod, Jamie leaves. It’s not like she consciously thinks to do it, but she looks back before she closes the front door behind her.

Dani’s looking right back at her.

-

Jamie drives in the usual silence on the ride back to her flat, this damned stretch of road without any radio signal whatsoever. She’s got roses on her mind, marigolds again, already mapping out her routine for tomorrow morning at the manor. She’ll have to forget about the roses for this season, she thinks bitterly to herself. Fucking Miles.

Her thoughts stray to the new au pair. Her hand on Jamie’s shoulder.

Jamie finds herself almost envying the kids that Dani Clayton has helped in her lifetime. Jamie wonders how on earth Dani managed to bring her down to a baseline she hasn’t been able to get herself to, while angry like that, in a long while. Especially in a way that didn’t make her feel like a child, that is.

 _Doesn’t matter,_ she supposes. The au pair is just that, the _au pair_ — not some random girl in town for the night, here on her way to someplace more interesting like London, someone Jamie can take the time to try and vaguely figure out before she’s off with some bloke. _Ah, so she was just being friendly, not trying to bed me,_ she’d realize, and then off to bed she’d go.

She’ll be staying far from the inside of the manor and the kids for as long as she can, from here on out. Bring her own meals, if she has to. She needs time and space away from the nightmare children. Every time she comes home from there, she feels like it’s added a new layer of skin, cold and brittle, and it takes her far too long to wash it off in a scalding-hot shower.

She parks alongside the street by the pub and nods hello to a few of the locals loitering about outside, smoking their cigarettes, blissfully drunk on a weekday evening.

“Oi, Jamie,” one of them yells, a grizzly man named Dylan, one of her favourite pool partners, “Fancy a brew?”

She waves her hand, continuing her walk into the side door of the pub. “Not tonight, D,” she says, “Long day.”

“It’s early, you little pansy!”

She gives him the middle finger without looking as she opens the side door entrance to the stairs and shuts it behind her.

When she gets up to her flat, Jamie throws her satchel on the couch and flicks on the lights. She takes in the space, loving the familiarity, the _smallness_ of it all, how it’s decorated with just the right amount of plants, ones that she mists every morning, ones that she knows will be there, untouched by tiny gremlin hands. Worlds away from her job, even if it’s only a fifteen minute drive out.

There’s indistinct yelling outside, men and women raucously conversing on the streets, and Jamie loves it. The normalcy of it all. None of the quiet, unsettling atmospheres of the manor. Safe. Alone.

Perfectly splendid.

-

She’s just showered and settled in to watch some telly with a glass of slightly old wine when the sound of her landline makes her jump.

“Fuck!” she says, wine sloshing in its glass for a few moments. She steadies it, turning down the sound of the infomercial playing, and picks up.

“What the hell is this about? It’s near ten in the evening,” she says, ready to let loose if it’s a crank call, a telemarketer, a wrong number.

“Jamie, dear, so sorry to bother you.” It’s Hannah. Jamie sighs, running a hand through her hair. Her deep annoyance recedes into vague irked-ness. Hannah is not someone Jamie has ever been able to bring herself to be angry with. Never.

“Right. What’s going on, then?”

“Something’s happened. Something’s wrong with Miles.”

“Alright,” Jamie says, raising an eyebrow. Has he touched her fucking plants again? No one's ever called her about the kids, and Jamie hopes to God that tonight isn’t the night it starts.

“And Dani thinks she’s seen Peter Quint.”

At this, Jamie sets the wine glass down on the table beside her landline.

“You’re jerking me about, aren’t you?”

“No. We called the police, but they weren’t of much use, said to call if they saw him again.”

Jamie scoffs. _Police._ Fuck the lot of them. Power-tripping bastards with their own personal agendas. Fuck them. “Of course they did. Jesus fuck.”

“Yes, yes,” Hannah murmurs, and Jamie could swear that for a moment, her voice sounded somewhat echoed, like she was speaking through a tunnel — but then she’s speaking again and it’s as clear as can be.

“I was wondering if it would be a bother for you to — oh, I don’t know, come back to the manor, maybe help us scope out the area. I would let Henry know, of course, that you came back, it wouldn’t be for nothing. Owen’s coming ‘round soon, too, I think. I just hate to think of that man leering about. Only so much Miss Clayton and I can do, the both of us.”

Jamie feels herself soften a bit at Hannah even considering that she’d charge for time spent outside of her gardens. Hannah, always considerate, kind, unassuming.

“Hannah, don’t worry about that,” she says, “I’ll be ‘round in a bit. Got my shotgun for the rats in the greenhouse, there, I’ll grab that on my way in. Stay inside for now, yeah?”

“Right, yes.” Hannah sounds far away again. Jamie feels that strange chill go up the back of her neck again.

She hangs up the phone and shakes it off, as usual.

She’s gotten good at that, shaking it off.

A tiny, tiny part of her brain, hidden in the back of her head, the one she hasn’t been able to quite shut off yet, finds Jamie excited to go back to the manor, the antithesis of the thoughts she had been thinking of staying away.

She tries not to read much into it, but blonde hair and blue eyes flash in her mind when she’s going to grab her keys and bag.

Out the door she goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next up we'll have a bit more conversation after jamie scares dani in the woods when they're looking for peter quint, more conversation between the two of them before jamie's off to sleep on the couch, and then the day after :^)


	5. love, possession, all the rest

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know the bly hype's sort of been dying down since it's been almost a month and netflix shows' half lives aren't exactly the longest, but i hope yall are still around for the long run. i sure am. <3

_Jamie is 17 and living out of her third foster home. An older couple, nice enough on the surface, but they always are. Jamie starts to make a point of staying out and about to avoid the husband, George, in particular, who never does anything inappropriate outright, but leers at her like he wants to. And that’s more than enough reason for her to never be home._

_Currently, she sits on the swing sets in the playground by Mikey’s foster home, Mikey scuffing his feet about in the sawdust beside her. He’s 11, bigger now, almost up to her shoulders. He’s got their mum’s nose._

_“All right?” Jamie asks, flicking the ashes off her cigarette, one from the pack she snatched from George’s trenchcoat pocket last week._

_“Yeah,” he says quietly, “Made a new friend at school. His name’s Jones. Like the last name.” Mikey looks at the cigarette Jamie smokes. “Can I have one?”_

_“In your dreams, mate,” she says, grinning at him. “This shite’s horrible for you.”_

_“Denny lets me have one sometimes.”_

_At this, Jamie takes a pause. “You see Denny?”_

_“Sometimes I run into him, on me way to school.”_

_Jamie hasn’t seen or heard from Denny since the burn incident all those years ago, and she can’t say she misses the bloke._

_“Yeah, well, you shouldn’t be lookin’ up to him for that kind of thing. Careful listening to what he’s got to say.”_

_“He says the same about you.”_

_Jamie scoffs. Her and Denny haven’t spoken since the hospital, an angry conversation where Denny called her all sorts of beautiful words for being the one responsible for fucking up his life, getting them separated, taken from their father. An angry conversation that ended in Jamie’s nose bloodied, arms being held back by a rather strong nurse, Denny’s lip split open and left eye swollen shut. Jamie likes to think he was the worse off of the two._

_“I’m sure he does.”_

_“D’you reckon mum’s ever coming back?”_

_Jamie sniffs, flicks her cigarette into the damp sawdust and crushes it out with her foot. Mikey asks this almost every time they see each other, and it should annoy Jamie by now, really piss her off, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t, because she remembers being Mikey’s age and wondering when her mum would start noticing her, start praising her, even scold her._

_She knows now that it was never going to happen, but when you’re 11, and you love someone, it feels like anything is possible. Someone you love who’s gone could come back just as easily as they left. Knock on the door, sweep you up, say “let’s go back home,” and tuck you into bed. Easy as that._

_“No,” she says quietly, watching the cigarette butt slowly dampen in the sawdust. “No, I don’t think so, Mikey.”_

-

Jamie heads straight to the greenhouse, climbing up on the step stool for the hidden shotgun on the top shelf, tucked behind some pothos that she’s been carefully pruning and growing since they were buds.

 _Peter Quint._ She runs through all of the possible scenarios in her head as she quietly walks, heading down into the woods. Jamie doesn’t want to kill him, not really, but a good shot to the knee would teach him a solid lesson or two. Would serve him right for what he did to the Wingraves, and Rebecca. Her aim’s gotten good enough after a particularly bad rat infestation last summer, after all.

She’s wandering when she hears a sudden snap of a branch beside her. Jamie hasn’t got a moment to figure out what’s going on before a bright light’s shining in her face, and she’s saying “ _Jesus”_ simultaneously with a voice that is absolutely _not_ Peter Quint’s voice.

Jamie immediately eases up on the shotgun, Dani breathing heavily beside her, and they both take a moment to compose themselves as Jamie looks up at her, half-annoyed, half-relieved. Dani’s staring at her shotgun, questions clearly swimming in her eyes even in the dark of the night, and Jamie, once again, feels the need to explain herself.

“Shot plenty of rats with it. More than happy to add Peter fucking Quint to the tally.”

“Not a fan, I take it.”

“You don’t know the half.”

“I’m learning.” Dani points the flashlight ahead of them, and in that moment, Jamie notices the poker from the fireplace gripped firmly in her other hand. There’s a rush of _something_ as she looks at it — pride? Surprise? She would never have pinned Dani Clayton as one to go out on her own to find a man at least two feet taller than her. Jamie wonders to herself what else she’s underestimated in the blonde.

“You’ve got the right idea,” Jamie says, eyes flitting down to the poker, then scanning their surroundings, then back at Dani. “I think it’s a teachable moment for him.”

She looks down into the grove, the chapel, turning back to Dani. “You looked down there yet?”

A quiet shake of the head.

Jamie starts walking, not asking Dani to follow, but hoping she does, anyway. She hears footsteps behind her and Dani is by her side again. That whiff of florals and shampoo again.

_Stop it._

_-_

They arrive back at the front doors of the manor, and this time, Dani is the one who opens the door for Jamie.

“Returning the favour,” Dani says, not making eye contact with Jamie, and Jamie, again, can’t help the smirk that appears on her face.

“Of opening the door for me? Strange, you American lot,” she mutters, chuckling, nodding her thanks.

They sit for hot chocolate, Miles and Flora going on and on about a sleepover, and Jamie thinks she wouldn’t quite mind the company for an otherwise lonely evening. She’ll stay over for the night.

-

It clicks for Jamie right around the time that Dani’s looking straight at her, sitting beside her, talking about the difference between _love_ and _possession,_ cradling her spiked hot chocolate. Jamie doesn’t quite want it to, she never does want it to, but it clicks. A name to the faint feeling she feels when she looks at the American that’s been niggling about in the back of her head. A name for the faint feeling felt in the gentleness, the way Dani looks at her, the way she always looks so earnest, how Jamie can see in the way she speaks of _love_ and _possession_ that Dani has experienced being broken apart and not quite put together correctly.

Jamie’s just about to start fighting it right back, as fast as it came, when Hannah’s interrupting the conversation - or more, staring contest - and Jamie doesn’t need to do much, at all. Thank fuck.

She scoops up young Flora in her arms, Dani mumbling another _thank you_ (does she ever get tired of thanking people?), and carries her up to her bed, remembering when Flora was small enough to weigh nothing in her arms.

“You’re the coolest.”

It’s one of the most normal things Flora has said to her in years.

Jamie wonders where the time has gone.

-

Dani’s tucking Flora in upstairs and Jamie’s back in the living room, Owen tidying up the blankets while Hannah clears the empty mugs. The fire’s starting to thin out a bit.

“You like her?” Owen says, and Jamie startles.

“What do you mean?”

“The au pair.” Owen folds up the blankets, tucks them into the shelf next to the sofas. “You like her, so far? Think she’s alright for the kids?”

“Right,” Jamie says, shaking her head, taking a few mugs from Hannah. “Yeah, she’s got them handled, it seems.”

Hannah’s speaking in her distant, airy tone from behind them on the walk to the kitchen. “I haven’t seen Flora and Miles quite like that in a long time.”

“Quite like what?” Jamie asks, setting the mugs down by the sink.

“Well, they’ve been acting quite like children, have they not been? Tonight?” Hannah says, starting up the dishes, wiping the mugs with an almost strange amount of focus.

Jamie merely shrugs. She agrees, wholeheartedly, but there isn’t much of a part of her that wants to engage in another conversation about the kids.

The grounds. She’s here to keep the grounds. Not the children.

“Do you need to borrow any clothes to sleep in? I’ve got spare toothbrushes in the bathroom for you and Owen. Got a few nighties you’re free to use in the guest closet, as well,” Hannah says, washing away, and Jamie shakes her head.

“Good for clothes, thanks, love. Think I’m going to try to be up as much as I can be, in case Quint decides to show his face.”

“And what,” Owen interjects, “Beat him to a pulp, small as you are? I’d pay good money to see that. 500 pounds, at least.”

“I could end you, Sharma, don’t test me,” Jamie says, punching Owen’s shoulder as she walks past him, back to the living room. He feigns pain, gripping his shoulder.

“Oh, Hannah, look what she’s done!”

“You two,” Hannah chides, “Maybe Miles and Flora’s spirits have somehow made their way into your bodies, the way you act, sometimes. Give them back, won’t you?”

-

Jamie wakes to a lukewarm cup of tea on the side table by the couch, her back aching and head pounding from lack of sleep. She takes a sip as she sits up and spits it back into the cup just as fast. All milk, hardly any tea, and she’s fairly sure she’s just spat out a mouthful of liquefied sugar.

_Poppins._

The feeling comes back again, warm and soft in her chest, but she shakes her head and stretches out the soreness, ready to get her morning ready, to get to work, take her mind off things, go check on her greenhouse. Ready to work, to feel frustration when the ground won’t quite give enough for her to be able to easily sow through. To feel relief when the marigolds start to bloom.

It’s what she knows best. It’s the feeling she knows best. The feeling where she knows exactly how it’ll end up.

-

She gives a curt nod and _hello_ to Dani when she passes by her on the way to the greenhouse, making only the briefest of eye contact, and it’d be impossible to miss the look of slight disappointment in the blonde’s eyes. What did she want? Small talk about the chilly morning? A compliment on the tea? Surely not. Jamie couldn’t lie about the tea if she wanted to, which she doesn’t, because Jamie doesn’t like lying.

Besides, _disappointment_? Did Dani come to Bly, take this job, expecting to make friends? Jamie hopes not. She can’t think of a more dreadful place to strike up a friendship, knowing that Hannah and Owen are the exceptions to the rule that seems to cast a shadow over Bly, the rule that there shan’t be a single person of any interest that lives in the area.

So, she ducks her head down into the dirt, waters her plants, fixes up a few loose bricks ‘round the courtyard. Eats a quiet lunch with Owen in the kitchen, long after Dani and the kids have eaten. Jamie continues her life as one of those inhabitants of Bly, not a single hint of interest within her, just a boring gardener, plucking weeds from the dirt.

Easy enough.

-

There hasn’t been any sign of Peter Quint all day, but Jamie decides to stick around for dinner, just in case. It’s quiet enough, Flora in bed after apparently having been found at the lake, screaming her head off when Dani tried carrying her off. Miles broods and picks at his vegetables. Any hint of childishness that had existed last night in the excitement of the sleepover has since vanished.

These children. These goddamned, strange children.

Dani is also uncharacteristically quiet, only answering Hannah’s questions about America, laughing at Owen’s god-awful jokes. Jamie stays silent, averting eye contact entirely with the woman beside her.

Miles finishes up his dinner and quietly excuses himself, says he’ll go check on Flora, and Hannah starts on the dishes, Dani quiet as ever, chewing on the nail of her thumb, staring down at the polaroid of Peter and Rebecca.

Jamie can’t think of any other words than _magnetic, beautiful, beautiful, brave, beautiful,_ when she looks at her, and she’s about to fight with herself again when the phone rings, jolting all of them into attention.

Dani’s the first to pick up. A meek _Peter?._ Silence.

The kids want to tell a story.

_Fucking storytime._

There is something very wrong with Miles.

A phone ringing, once again. _Thank fuck._

“Sorry, Pete, bad news, but she’s dead.”

A voice that does not belong to Peter Quint.

“I — pardon the intrusion. Is this the Wingrave residence? Is Owen Sharma there? This is Mr. McQueeny, his neighbour, I — his mother — his mother’s just passed.”

“Oh, God. Uh, yeah —”

Dani ushering the kids off to bed, telling them to take off their makeup and get to sleep, immediately.

Hannah holding Owen’s hand as he stands at the phone, shell-shocked.

Jamie watches outside as Hannah consoles, or at least tries to console, Owen. Something is whispered in his ear that Jamie and Dani can’t quite hear.

Jamie thinks of when she received a call from Mikey, two years ago, letting her know their dad’s passed. Lung cancer. Probably from all that time in the soot, breathing it in, letting it infect him, letting it kill him. Jamie thinks of how she said “ _That’s too bad, then,”_ and hanging up. Crying in the greenhouse until she felt like she was going to faint. Not sad at the loss of her father, necessarily, but sad at what she had lost all those years ago. The father she lost when she was a wee child. The mother she lost. The brothers she lost. Dani stands stoically by her side.

What a turn of events this night has become.

Jamie’s got full intentions to get home, finish off a handle of scotch, and cry herself to sleep as she walks to her truck, but Dani’s speaking behind her, speeding up to match her pace.

“I’m so glad —“

Jamie’s heart, stuck in her throat.

“You stayed.”

Jamie swallowing her heart down.

“I am, too.”

She’s almost afraid to, she almost doesn’t, but at the last second, Jamie turns to Dani. Searches her eyes for something she is certain she will not find. But against her will, against all the fucking odds, she finds it. She finds it, and she’s sure Dani finds it in Jamie’s eyes, as well.

But maybe not.

Maybe this is a trick of the light, a trick of the dark. Jamie’s halfway to convincing herself that this is the case when Dani is stepping closer, into her space, and a hand is reaching for Jamie’s.

A hand is holding Jamie’s.

A thumb is brushing over Jamie’s hand.

There are no tricks of the light, no tricks of the dark, when Dani takes Jamie’s hand.

It clicks even more than it did last night in the living room by the fire, clicks in a way Jamie would have never allowed without concrete proof, etched in before it sets, Dani’s avoidance of any and all questions about fancying Owen, and all Jamie can think to do is _stare._

“Who the hell knew?” is all she can think to say before she’s seating herself in her truck, unable to think past that, anything else, unable to keep looking at the au pair, who looks at her with what looks like _hope_ in her eyes.

Jamie drives back home and the usual strange, unsettling chill she feels upon leaving the grounds remains, but not in the hand that Dani had held.

The seedling that Dani has planted grows.

Jamie can only stand and watch.

She won’t do much else. It’s really not that she _can’t._

She just won’t.


	6. the greenhouse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> beep boop. hope ur all doin good. <3

_Jamie is 18 and walking home from work. A nice, easy job at the grocer’s as a stock-boy. She does inventory, says maybe three sentences in total all day, clocks in and out. Nice and boring. She’s saved up a fair sum of money, plans on leaving for London soon enough, she can’t stand this fucking town anymore. It’s less so as the years pass, but she still gets looks every now and then, snickers from the younger folks who laugh at the abandoned whore’s daughter._

_She barely has a moment to register what’s happening before a boy, who can’t be older than 14, is prowling towards her with a switchblade in the alleyway shortcut she takes to get back home._

_“Cash,” he says, one syllable, and Jamie just looks at the knife._

_“You’re fucking kidding me. What are you, five years old? Get out of my way.”_

_He steps closer to her, brandishing the short blade. “Cash.”_

_She backs up and is met with another body behind her, and she whirls around to see Denny grinning wide at her._

_“Hey, little Jamie,” he sneers._

_“Denny,” she says, glancing back nervously at the boy with the switchblade. “What’s all this?”_

_“Heard from Mikey you’ve got a nice little life going, a nice little job at the market. Saved up some. You owe me money.”_

_She hasn’t seen Mikey in months, after an argument where Mikey insisted that Denny wasn’t as bad as Jamie had made him out to be. Denny had somehow managed to plant something in Mikey’s brain, something poisonous — something that Jamie had tried so hard to prevent from growing. It seemed she was too late. Jamie tries not to think about it too much — the fact that Mikey’s chosen Denny’s side of life after all that they’d been through together. Tries not to feel betrayed for the fact that she was the one who raised Mikey, not Denny, and yet Denny is the one who won his affections._

_Jamie shakes her head, swallowing back the fear, persistent in her throat, but it only makes its way further down into her stomach, her legs. “What the fuck are you on about?”_

_“Time is money, innit?” he says, shoving her back. Jamie stumbles into the brick wall, hitting the back of her head. “You have any idea how much of my time you’ve wasted by pulling that stunt with the hot water? The hospital? How bloody difficult you went and made my life? Mikey’s? Over some piss-hot water?” Denny says, stepping closer to her. The kid with the blade stands by._

_There’s movement in the corner of Jamie’s eye and she sees Mikey enter the alleyway, wringing his hands._

_“Mikey, what the fuck?” Jamie breathes hoarsely. “Tell him to back off.”_

_“Just give him the cash, James,” Mikey says, voice quiet, not nearly as loud and authoritative as Denny. “We know you’ve got some.”_

_“I don’t have any on me.” Jamie feels her eyes start to burn at the betrayal of her own blood, her family, cornering her in the alley like she’s street trash._

_“Lie.” Denny shoves her into the wall again and Jamie’s breath comes out in a whoosh._

_“Fuck off!” she yells, pushing back at him, and before she knows it she’s being pinned against the wall by her big brother._

_“Mikey, grab her bag and let’s go,” he growls._

_“Mikey, please, no, c’mon, Mikey, don’t listen to him,” she’s stammering, struggling against Denny’s strong hands, and she looks into Denny’s eyes and only sees her father._

_There’s what looks like a faint apology in Mikey’s eyes as he approaches her and takes the bag hanging off her shoulder._

_“Follow us and get the beating of your life,” Denny growls at her. He pulls her towards him so they’re nose to nose. “I don’t ever want to see your ugly fucking mug again, you hear me?”_

_Jamie, heart pounding, mind racing, the back of her skull aching, can only think to spit in his face._

_“Bitch!” he yells, and shoves her back into the wall, drawing his fist back, and Jamie’s prepared for the blow when Mikey’s pulling his brother’s arm back._

_“Stop, stop, it’s not worth it, I’ve got the bag, let’s just go,” he’s saying, “Stop.”_

_“Fuck both of you!” she yells, shoving Denny into Mikey, and she’s bolting down the street, not seeing if they’re following. She doesn’t cry, just in case they’re behind them, just in case they’re following._

_They probably aren’t, anyway._

-

Jamie pulls into the driveway of Bly Manor, ready for another day of work, her body still not quite recovered from sleeping on the couch the other night — but feeling energized regardless. Owen’s got the day off to make funeral arrangements for his mother, with Hannah and Jamie implicitly agreeing to say nothing to Henry so as to ensure Owen still gets paid for the day.

Her usual routine is to head straight to the greenhouse, put on her coveralls, get to work, but she finds herself considering heading inside to…grab a cup of coffee? A biscuit? She’s not hungry. Maybe she can say hi to Hannah? The kids?

The kids. As if.

 _Don’t fuck about with yourself,_ she thinks, _you want to say hi to Dani. You want to know if last night was some fluke._

Dani, who just last night did something as seemingly innocent as take Jamie’s hand before she left for the night. Dani, who, despite everything and anything Jamie had assumed, looked Jamie straight in the eye as she grazed her thumb along Jamie’s hand.

 _Hand-holding._ Jamie from a month ago would scoff at herself for the schoolyard flirting she’s clearly tripped herself into. Maybe slap herself about.

None of this is particularly new. She’s had the occasional woman at the pub lean into her, testing the waters, wondering if she’s _one of them,_ with her boyish dress and demeanour, women trying to kiss her in the bathroom, giggling and saying shite like “ _Joey says he doesn’t mind if it’s women, it doesn’t count_.”

Jamie isn’t one to want to sleep around, she doesn’t have the time or will to be around people enough for that — though she is only human, and a girl will very sporadically find herself in Jamie’s bed for one night before Jamie’s kicking them out, citing early work the next morning.

Besides, Bly isn’t exactly a place where anyone outside of the norm roam, so Jamie has learned to pick up on what matters, the smallest of signals, and even then, sometimes, she’s wrong. She wonders if she’s still wrong about Dani Clayton. Wonders if Dani Clayton thinks she was wrong about Jamie.

Jamie huffs, hops out of the truck and finds herself irritated, downright furious at herself, for allowing the au pair to go from but a tickle in her mind to nearly saturating the inside of her head. She’s mad that Dani’s done this by doing something as inconsequential as a hand-hold. What appears to Jamie as meaningful glances as they speak of love and possession.

Moreover, Jamie feels like she’s 16 and going to class for the first time in weeks, a pretty girl in her arithmetics class asking her to borrow a goddamned pencil. And it makes her feel downright juvenile.

So, Jamie doesn’t go inside. Jamie goes straight into the greenhouse, prunes and repots a plant that looks like it’s going through a fair bit of root rot. Wanders the grounds, raking leaves, cutting grass, shearing hedges.

Easy work. Idle work.

She’s on the verge of finally fully immersing herself within her plants when Hannah’s voice sounds from behind her.

“Jamie, darling?”

Jamie turns, shears in hand. Can’t get annoyed with Hannah. Never Hannah. But _fuck’s sake, Hannah._

“Hannah. All right?”

“Yes, yes, thank you,” Hannah says, holding out a cup of tea. “Figured you’d want this. It’s getting quite chilly out here. Are you warm enough?”

Jamie chuckles, shaking her head and placing the shears down, taking her gloves off. “Yeah, I am, thanks. You’re a star.” She reaches for the cup, pausing before it reaches her lips. “This wasn’t made by Dani, right?”

“Oh, heavens, no,” Hannah says, crossing her arms, looking off just past Jamie’s shoulder. “Hopefully she learns to stick with her strengths. Bless her heart.”

Hannah has always been a little distant, off in space, it seems, but lately, more and more so. Seemingly disappearing from the inside of the manor to go for what Jamie would assume are walks to the chapel, walks around the grounds, the lake.

Jamie takes a sip, proper tea, just the right amount of milk, and nods. “How’s it going on the inside, there?”

“It’s quiet. Especially without Owen and his damned jokes. Poor man. I hope he’s doing alright. And Dani — well, Dani’s just going through some fractions with the children,” Hannah says, her attention snapping back to Jamie. “She’s quite good with them. They’re calmer, I feel.”

“They’re probably afraid she’ll have ‘em picking up stray sticks from the driveway if they toe out of line,” Jamie jokes. Hannah chuckles, and seems to stray for another second.

“Hannah?”

“Ah, yes, yes,” Hannah says, shaking her head. “Well, by any means, you two seem to get along well.” Hannah starts rubbing her hands along her arms. “I haven’t seen you take to a new person like that in a long while. I thought you were going to murder Owen when you first met him, the first few times he made his batter puns.”

Jamie ducks her head, takes a few more sips of the tea. “Yeah, well,” she says, clearing her throat, “Not about to pick out hats together at the shop and go for afternoon strolls together anytime soon.”

“Right, yes,” Hannah says, and she sniffles slightly. “Silly me, I didn’t bring a jacket out, and I’m freezing. Back inside I go,” she murmurs, “Will you be in for lunch? Stay for dinner?”

“Ah, don’t think so.” Jamie waves her hand. “Finishing up here early today, I think.”

“Alright, well, if I don't see you tomorrow morning when you come to get Miss Clayton…tell Owen I send him my love.”

“I will.”

Jamie doesn’t see Dani once for the rest of the time she’s there, though she can’t be sure if it’s intentional on Dani’s part or not.

_Why would it be intentional? Don’t be dim-witted. Christ._

She stops at the front doors of the manor, about to head in to grab a glass of water, but stops with her hand halfway to the handles.

_I’ll just…drink water at home._

_-_

The day after, Jamie pulls into the Bly manor driveway once again, this time dressed for Margaret Sharma’s funeral. She’s wearing lipstick for what feels like the first time in years, and _no,_ it has nothing to do with the fact that she’s to pick up Dani and head over to the funeral home.

She finds herself honest-to-god doing a _once over_ in the rearview mirror of her car, making sure her lipstick’s in good order, her hair hasn’t gone astray, and she has to remind herself that a woman’s just died and there is absolutely no room whatsoever for her to try to be looking nice for a girl.

 _A girl._ The au pair.

There’s a moment when she walks into Dani’s room where they both _look_ at each other. Dani is more nervous than usual, and Jamie wonders if it’s because of her, or because of the fact that she’s getting ready to go to a funeral of a woman she’s never met. She finds herself hoping for the former.

 _There was a funeral in my own life,_ Dani says.

 _I don’t need you to be my date to Owen’s mum’s funeral,_ Jamie says, tossing out the word _date,_ rolling it around in her mind, gauging Dani’s reaction, and there doesn’t seem to be one other than the nervous smile Dani’s always giving her.

A yelp and a jump forward when Jamie does up her dress. _What the hell?_

She looks back at Dani before closing the door behind her.

Dani is looking right back at her.

-

Owen did well, about as well as anyone could do in circumstances like the one he had the unfortunate luck of being thrown into. Jamie stays for a bit, standing in the corner in the reception room, sipping awkwardly at a glass of water as she watches Owen take condolences, his face blank.

She can’t imagine. A life having to take care of someone with an expiration date, an imminent one, and it’s not sudden, it’s slow — like if you plant flowers in the wrong kind of soil, water it too much, don’t water it enough, it dies a slow death. Yellows until it’s too late to save it, but you don’t want to throw it out. So you just watch and watch until it shrivels into itself, smaller and smaller, and you can hardly remember what it looked like.

-

Jamie gets back to Bly — she doesn’t have to come back, not really, the grass and plants and raking can wait — and takes off her earrings, looks up.

Dani is looking right back at her. Illuminating warmth that starts in Jamie’s throat travels down to her stomach. Jamie smiles.

There’s a hint of a smile back.

Dishes thrown into the sink.

Jamie doesn’t know what to make of any of it, anymore.

-

Hannah and Owen are off in their own world by the fire. Talking quietly to each other. Jamie picks up words like _Paris_ and _Hannah Grose in Paris_ and silently grins to herself. These two. She hopes they find a way to leave this place, soon. She hopes she does, too.

Dani is picking at a twig she’d found on the ground, taking long swigs from her wine bottle. She’s been acting off, distant, nearly all day. And while Jamie can move on when Hannah acts the same, she finds herself losing the will to _just ignore it_ with every minute that passes. She can’t. Not with Dani.

So she clears her throat, makes up a half-hearted excuse about forgetting to lock up the greenhouse earlier. Hopes, but doesn’t ask, that Dani will come with. And she does.

In the minutes it takes to get to the greenhouse, Jamie’s already forgotten that she was to lock the door (which she never really does, anyway — no one wants to steal mounds of dirt or young buds) and walks straight in, taking a seat in the makeshift bench she built years ago. Dani doesn’t seem to mind much, settling herself beside her, taking another gulp of wine. Jamie is entirely cognizant of how close by Dani’s body is, and she takes a moment to peek at her other side. Plenty of space. Dani has chosen to sit this close.

Dani tells Jamie the story of her fiancé, her voice wavering, not making eye contact with Jamie, and Jamie can’t help but sling her arm behind her, looking at her face, _beautiful, magnetic._

“I know how it feels,” Jamie starts to say, thinking of her mother, her father, Mikey how loss can feel no matter how you feel for someone, “It feels like — you can’t —“

Then Dani’s lips are on hers and her hand is wrapping around Jamie’s shoulder and the logistics of how they get there stop mattering, but Jamie still wants to be sure, _needs_ to be sure —

“You sure?”

A pause. Jamie starts pulling back, ever so slightly, any sign of hesitation is enough for her to pull back, but then —

“Yes.”

 _Thank fuck._ Whether she says it out loud or in her head, she can’t tell. Jamie loses herself.

For the first time in a long time, she’s lost herself in something other than the lilac blossoms in the courtyard during a particularly balmy summer day, something other than tilling the soil until her back aches. Bly Manor feels less sinister all of a sudden, far away even, and the only words Jamie can think of to describe Dani are _beautiful, beautiful, soft, magnetic, beautiful._ It doesn’t matter that she can’t pull any other words from her lexicon, she can’t find anything more creative, because all that matters are Dani’s lips moving against hers, soft sighs escaping from between them, a tongue swiping at Jamie’s bottom lip, a hint of a moan at the back of Dani’s throat, the heat pooling incessantly at the bottom of Jamie’s stomach —

And Dani’s gasping again, jerking back, just like she did in her room before the funeral. Dani jerks back and Jamie is reminded of the women who have kissed her and realized it wasn’t right, wasn’t normal.

A pause.

“Right,” Jamie says under her breath, the heat in her stomach almost instantly having dissipated into embarrassment. Creeping up into her chest, her cheeks. It’s embarrassment for grasping that Dani had literally _just_ spoken about her massively fucked-up history with her ex-fiancé, literally _just_ talked about how the reason she’s acting off this whole time is because of him.

And Jamie is embarrassed for having let herself get so lost. So, so lost, _so_ lost in a woman who she’s known for all of a few weeks.

“ _I don’t know what to say_ ” is all that Jamie hears, and she’s out the doors.

“Another night,” she says, half-joking,

“Another time, maybe.”

But she won't let it get that far. Not again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> once again, i would love love love if u could leave kudos and some comments -- i love reading each of your comments because it gives me a chance to engage with the fandom in a way i cant since i dont really use tumblr. love yall!!!


End file.
